When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-

Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded. This has surprised no one more than Traust Jonsson, who was long in charge of climate research for the Iceland met office (and with whom Homewood has been in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version completely “disappears” Iceland’s “sea ice years” around 1970, when a period of extreme cooling almost devastated his country’s economy.

One of the first examples of these “adjustments” was exposed in 2007 by the statistician Steve McIntyre, when he discovered a paper published in 1987 by James Hansen, the scientist (later turned fanatical climate activist) who for many years ran Giss. Hansen’s original graph showed temperatures in the Arctic as having been much higher around 1940 than at any time since. But as Homewood reveals in his blog post, “Temperature adjustments transform Arctic history”, Giss has turned this upside down. Arctic temperatures from that time have been lowered so much that that they are now dwarfed by those of the past 20 years.

Homewood’s interest in the Arctic is partly because the “vanishing” of its polar ice (and the polar bears) has become such a poster-child for those trying to persuade us that we are threatened by runaway warming. But he chose that particular stretch of the Arctic because it is where ice is affected by warmer water brought in by cyclical shifts in a major Atlantic current – this last peaked at just the time 75 years ago when Arctic ice retreated even further than it has done recently. The ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all.

Of much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record – for reasons GHCN and Giss have never plausibly explained – has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known. This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.

It’s time to stand up for coal. Send the EPA an email on behalf of WV and Congressman Nick Joe Rahall. He has requested West Virginians take advantage of the newly extended deadline for public input on the EPA’s proposed rule limiting carbon emissions from existing power plants. The EPA has moved its deadline for public comment on the Clean Power Plant Proposed Rule from October 16, to December 1, 2014, giving citizens an additional 45 days to weigh in. Please share this information. This is a way we can make a difference!

Here is a letter you may copy and paste into an email. Feel free to modify:

Dear EPA representative:

I stand with Congressman Nick Joe Rahall against the war on coal.

Coal is not only the life blood of West Virginians, millions of people outside of our state will be affected adversely in higher utility costs.

We are all for an “all of the above” strategy for reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil from nations which really don’t like us very much.

But the Obama administration has repeatedly shown its disdain for anything and everything to do with fossil fuels. His goal is one of singularity: Bankrupt the coal industry.

As one of these great “’United States’ of America”, West Virginia and surrounding coal states like Kentucky and Pennsylvania will be crippled. Our people will be more deeply suppressed into a poverty the rest of the nation could not possibly fathom or frankly, understand.

Our children will not be able to compete on a national level and we will wither into the ever-growing safety net of the U.S. government – at her mercy and under her wing of sustenance.

Americans and West Virginians deserve better. We implore you to honor our state’s service to the country in providing abundant energy for all Americans. Work with Congressman Rahall to develop clean coal technology.

Give coal the chance the Obama administration has offered other forms of energy. West Virginia will not let our country down!

And as West Virginians, we honor the efforts of Congressman Rahall. He stands with us in this fight.

Like this:

By CORAL DAVENPORT

A coal-fired power plant in Kentucky. Coal-heavy states could be economic losers in any climate-change protocol that targets such plants, which are among the largest greenhouse gas emitters.Credit Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress.

In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.

To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path.

“If you want a deal that includes all the major emitters, including the U.S., you cannot realistically pursue a legally binding treaty at this time,” said Paul Bledsoe, a top climate change official in the Clinton administration who works closely with the Obama White House on international climate change policy.

Lawmakers in both parties on Capitol Hill say there is no chance that the currently gridlocked Senate will ratify a climate change treaty in the near future, especially in a political environment where many Republican lawmakers remain skeptical of the established science of human-caused global warming.

“There’s a strong understanding of the difficulties of the U.S. situation, and a willingness to work with the U.S. to get out of this impasse,” said Laurence Tubiana, the French ambassador for climate change to the United Nations. “There is an implicit understanding that this not require ratification by the Senate.”

American negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement — a proposal to blend legally binding conditions from an existing 1992 treaty with new voluntary pledges. The mix would create a deal that would update the treaty, and thus, negotiators say, not require a new vote of ratification.

Countries would be legally required to enact domestic climate change policies — but would voluntarily pledge to specific levels of emissions cuts and to channel money to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change. Countries might then be legally obligated to report their progress toward meeting those pledges at meetings held to identify those nations that did not meet their cuts.

“There’s some legal and political magic to this,” said Jake Schmidt, an expert in global climate negotiations with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “They’re trying to move this as far as possible without having to reach the 67-vote threshold” in the Senate.

The strategy comes as scientists warn that the earth is already experiencing the first signs of human-caused global warming — more severe drought and stronger wildfires, rising sea levels and more devastating storms — and the United Nations heads toward what many say is the body’s last chance to avert more catastrophic results in the coming century.

At the United Nations General Assembly in New York next month, delegates will gather at a sideline meeting on climate change to try to make progress toward the deal next year in Paris. A December meeting is planned in Lima, Peru, to draft the agreement.

In seeking to go around Congress to push his international climate change agenda, Mr. Obama is echoing his domestic climate strategy. In June, he bypassed Congress and used his executive authority to order a far-reaching regulation forcing American coal-fired power plants to curb their carbon emissions. That regulation, which would not be final until next year, already faces legal challenges, including a lawsuit filed on behalf of a dozen states.

But unilateral action by the world’s largest economy will not be enough to curb the rise of carbon pollution across the globe. That will be possible only if the world’s largest economies, including India and China, agree to enact similar cuts.

The Obama administration’s international climate strategy is likely to infuriate Republican lawmakers who already say the president is abusing his executive authority by pushing through major policies without congressional approval.

“Unfortunately, this would be just another of many examples of the Obama administration’s tendency to abide by laws that it likes and to disregard laws it doesn’t like — and to ignore the elected representatives of the people when they don’t agree,” Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader, said in a statement.

A deal that would not need to be ratified by the United States or any other nation is also drawing fire from the world’s poorest countries. In African and low-lying island nations — places that scientists say are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change — officials fear that any agreement made outside the structure of a traditional United Nations treaty will not bind rich countries to spend billions of dollars to help developing nations deal with the forces of climate change.

Let’s be clear about what will actually happen — the fossil fuel energy infrastructure is going to come under relentless physical and…

Winston Churchill said, “The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the solar…

Some of the comments responding to this article really are appalling. The shear bear behind ignorance of the climate change deniers and..

Poor countries look to rich countries to help build dams and levees to guard against coastal flooding from rising seas levels, or to provide food aid during pervasive droughts.

“Without an international agreement that binds us, it’s impossible for us to address the threats of climate change,” said Richard Muyungi, a climate negotiator for Tanzania. “We are not as capable as the U.S. of facing this problem, and historically we don’t have as much responsibility. What we need is just one thing: Let the U.S. ratify the agreement. If they ratify the agreement, it will trigger action across the world.”

Observers of United Nations climate negotiations, which have gone on for more than two decades without achieving a global deal to legally bind the world’s biggest polluters to carbon cuts, say that if written carefully such an agreement could be a creative and pragmatic way to at least level off the world’s rapidly rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

About a dozen countries are responsible for nearly 70 percent of the world’s carbon pollution, chiefly from cars and coal-fired power plants.

At a 2009 climate meeting in Copenhagen, world leaders tried but failed to forge a new legally binding treaty to supplant the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Instead, they agreed only to a series of voluntary pledges to cut carbon emissions through 2020.

The Obama administration’s climate change negotiators are desperate to avoid repeating the failure of Kyoto, the United Nations’ first effort at a legally binding global climate change treaty. Nations around the world signed on to the deal, which would have required the world’s richest economies to cut their carbon emissions, but the Senate refused to ratify the treaty, ensuring that the world’s largest historic carbon polluter was not bound by the agreement.

Seventeen years later, the Senate obstacle remains. Even though Democrats currently control the chamber, the Senate has been unable to reach agreement to ratify relatively noncontroversial United Nations treaties. In 2012, for example, Republican senators blocked ratification of a United Nations treaty on equal rights for the disabled, even though the treaty was modeled after an American law and had been negotiated by a Republican president, George W. Bush.

This fall, Senate Republicans are poised to pick up more seats, and possibly to retake control of the chamber. Mr. McConnell, who has been one of the fiercest opponents of Mr. Obama’s climate change policy, comes from a coal-heavy state that could be an economic loser in any climate-change protocol that targets coal-fired power plants, the world’s largest source of carbon pollution.

Like this:

Barack Obama plans to bankrupt the coal industry — with or without Congress.

A recent U.S. News article revealed that an emboldened Obama administration plans to move on climate change with or without congressional support by asserting executive privilege aimed at preventing any new coal-fired power plants from being built in the United States.

“If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will,” the president remarked in his fourth State of the Union address. “I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions … to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.”

Obama’s yearning to dismantle the coal industry was evident early in his presidency.

“Under my plan of cap and trade system, electricity price would necessarily skyrocket … Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, natural gas … whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers,” the president said. “So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

This shameful disregard for the families of coal-producing states and the subsequent impact on our nation suggests a supreme naivety as to its impact.

According to the Institute for Energy Research, coal is currently used to meet 20 percent of America’s total energy demand and generate 42 percent of all its electricity. In addition, the United States has enough recoverable coal reserves to last at least another 250 years, with reserves that are over one-and-one half times greater than our nearest competitor, Russia, and over twice that of China.

America’s “known” coal reserves alone constitute 27 percent of the entire world’s coal supply. Clean coal technology using gasification is a promising alternative to meet the global energy demand and provide a significant energy resource advantage for the U.S.

But Barack Obama has proven he isn’t interested in the United States becoming energy independent. He’s simply obsessed with achieving his “presidential prize” of eradicating the coal industry.

And while the president aspires to become our nation’s global warming “savior,” other countries are ardently pursuing the benefits of coal and dismissing lobbyist-led carbon emissions concerns, leaving America choking on its own “fumes of folly.”

According to the U.S. Energy Information administration, China burns almost as much coal as the rest of the world combined!

Yet experts expect President Obama will soon order the EPA to set standards on the coal industry which are so economically unrealistic it will not only prevent any new plants from being built, it will lead to crippling regulations on existing coal-fired plants.

At this point, I’m not sure which is worse — the “trumped” up charge that “man” is impacting climate change or Obama’s self-proclaimed “anointing” to save the world from carbon emissions.

Either way, the coal industry, the U.S. and states like West Virginia lose.

Mark Caserta is a Cabell County resident and a regular contributor to The Herald-Dispatch editorial page.